UNDER CONSTRUCTION Nhlanhla Dlamini’s factory in ...manelifoods.com/media/city-press.pdf ·...
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6 CITY PRESS, 9 OCTOBER, 2016 business A PROJECT IN PARTNERSHIP WITH THE IDC TALK TO US Are you a young person starting out in business? Tell us your story. Email us at [email protected] using ‘Young business’ in the subject line S mart entrepreneurs look for opportunities where others only see obstacles. That’s the belief of Nhlanhla Dlamini, a young industrialist who has hit on the idea of taking offcuts of ostrich, game and crocodile meat and processing them into high-end pet food and treats for the overseas market. “It’s basically taking waste products from abattoirs and converting them into premium, value-added products, using proteins that aren’t available in other markets,” explains the brains behind Maneli Pets. His new venture is securing Industrial Development Corporation (IDC) financing to buy machinery and convert a factory in Sebenza near Edenvale, east of Johannesburg, into an export-grade facility, which is due to begin production in March next year. One man’s trash is another man’s treasure, so the saying goes, and Dlamini is excited about his new pet food venture using meat byproducts. The factory will create 40 new jobs (semi-skilled, unskilled and management) when it opens for business, with up to 300 positions being created in its first three years of operation. Maneli Pets is an offshoot of the Maneli Group, a diversified food company that looks for opportunities to build businesses in the agricultural and green energy sector, while boosting black entrepreneurship. Maneli is his mother’s clan name, and he named his business in honour of “one of my biggest supporters”. The backdrop to this is that South Africa has relatively few black-owned food production businesses, and government is actively promoting agroprocessing and the manufacturing sector in general to spur economic growth. The country needs to make products to consume locally and also to export, instead of importing them. As such, the local food production and processing arena is ripe for the picking – with funding entities such as the IDC willing to step in to invest in worthwhile projects that create or expand manufacturing capability in the agriculture value chain. “In Africa, the bulk of food is grown by multinationals and there are opportunities for black entrepreneurs in this space,” says Dlamini animatedly. “With the country experiencing slow growth, we need a new generation of industrialists to step forward.” Dlamini’s pioneering spirit was born in the Soweto suburb of Mofolo South. His family moved to the south of Johannesburg, but his parents continued to run a small shop in Orlando East, meaning “I went back and forth between Soweto and suburbia”. He got through much of high school and all of university thanks to scholarships, and is acutely aware that many of his peers, gifted and intelligent though they were, did not have the same opportunities. “I was one of the lucky ones,” he reflects. “Had I not had access to scholarships and had my parents not made the sacrifices they did, my life would have turned out differently.” He enrolled at Wits University for a BCom and a postgraduate diploma in management, and started reaching for the stars: the US and a Harvard Business School MBA beckoned, and he worked at McKinsey & Company locally and abroad. In between, he completed his MPhil in international development at Oxford University in the UK. His thesis was on youth unemployment in South Africa – knowing that he wanted to come home and make a difference. “I’m firmly committed to South Africa – to try to grow the economy, create jobs and lower inequality,” says Dlamini. “One of the bigger influences on my life was growing up seeing Nelson Mandela coming out of prison and becoming president, and others who sacrificed their lives for democracy. The sacrifices of this generation are far smaller than those of previous ones, so it’s up to us to stabilise the country and make it prosper.” Dlamini believes the “formula” for a good entrepreneur is someone who can “spot an opportunity, build good teams and who has business acumen from formal education or work experience”. The last point is not something that can be brushed aside, he says, as selling your business to funders and your product to the market require a certain amount of business savvy. Fortunately, there are small business “incubators”, such as the Awethu Project, that “build on the raw ingredients” or qualities that a budding entrepreneur has, and add extra skills and knowledge to help him or her get ahead, and this is where Dlamini obtained some of the seed capital for his first business. Passionate though Dlamini is about South Africa, he “loved my time abroad” and is a firm advocate of travelling, broadening one’s horizons and learning from the world. In fact, it was while he was overseas that he spotted business models and innovations that he thought could be applied to South Africa. “South African society is very insular, and we need to find new ways of working better. Ideas come from a diversity of experiences and interactions – you can come up with good ideas about business and life if you push your boundaries beyond what you usually do,” says this former Rhodes Scholar and Goldman Sachs Global Leader. “We also need a greater level of ambition. Americans are famous for being their own biggest supporters, and it’s a good skill to be your own biggest fan and be wildly ambitious – don’t let your mind constrain your ambition before you even start. South Africans are quite conservative and need to be more open to taking risks.” Dlamini is not naive in his thinking – he knows that South Africa’s manufacturing sector has many challenges when it comes to labour, infrastructure and logistics. “But there are pockets of opportunity and the challenges are not insurmountable,” says this natural optimist. “It’s how you navigate them that matters.” UNDER CONSTRUCTION Nhlanhla Dlamini’s factory in Johannesburg will soon be humming with activity when it begins operations in March 2017 PHOTO: VIC BRUMMER Opportunities out of obstacles SA needs to produce more of its own consumer goods as a primary way to ignite economic growth. Young black industrialist Nhlanhla Dlamini has accepted the challenge, writes Christina Kennedy FUNDING There are two parts to the funding conundrum. The first is debt, which is getting money from organisations like the IDC and from commercial banks. Unfortunately, South African banks are risk-averse, which is a stumbling block. The second is equity. Most black entrepreneurs don’t have an uncle they can ask for money. It is difficult for entrepreneurs to get out of the starting blocks without an angel investor or family to fall back on. DLAMINI’S 3 BIGGEST CHALLENGES TO SUCCESS 1 2 3 BUILDING A GOOD TEAM When you are starting a small business, there’s more work to be done than there are people, so everyone has to be 100% right for their role. Finding great black talent to work in your small business is extremely difficult because dynamic black professionals are all snapped up by private or government jobs that pay them well above the price points that a small business can afford. ENERGY AND RESILIENCE Anyone starting a small business needs to be mindful of the peaks and valleys that entrepreneurship brings. From week to week, day to day, hour to hour, you can be on top of the world and then in the depths of despair. You have to find ways of coping with this roller coaster – be it spiritually, actively or interpersonally – otherwise you will burn out quickly. NHLANHLA DLAMINI [email protected] As a young, passionate South African, I am deeply concerned about our stalled economic growth, our unemployment rates and our country’s desperate inequality. All these malaises affect young people more deeply, those younger than 36 who should be empowered to move the needle and take our democracy forward. I am 32 years old and I left my management consulting job because I knew that I couldn’t do enough in that role to eradicate inequality, create jobs and fuel the economy. That said, it was risky and difficult for me to switch from a corporate job to entrepreneurship because, as a young person growing up in Soweto, I was socialised to revere an office job, which represents stability. I took the risk because I felt that the time was right. I realised that if I didn’t take the plunge, I would never do it and forever wonder if I had missed my chance to leave a meaningful and lasting legacy on the economic landscape of South Africa. Our democracy’s economic progress so far can be roughly divided into three periods. From 1994 until 2000, the priority was to stabilise our fledgling democracy with the goodwill of the world behind us. The 2000s, until the crash of 2008, was a time of great economic prosperity and growth, with an economic growth high of 7.10% in the fourth quarter of 2006. There was an emergence of black business leaders in all sectors and the black middle class swelled. These were my formative years, this is the South Africa I want to rekindle. Since 2009, many upheavals at home and abroad have stalled our growth, and we all need to do our part to restart it. The growth rate for the last quarter to the end of June last year was 0.6%. Quite rightly, the call goes out to government to do something. Government has put in place good policy – policy that is inclusive and that seeks to send the elevator back down for those who were left behind. However, government’s greatest challenge is implementing all these well-meaning policies and it needs to do much more to follow through on this. The private sector, too, has been called on to do more. From a neoliberal perspective, our private sector is fulfilling its mandate of maximising shareholder gains. It is a tall order, but a reasonable one given South Africa’s history of economic exclusion, that our corporate citizens should be doing more to help in the daily work of eradicating inequality, nurturing an environment that creates jobs and they should be investing more in igniting growth. There are more than 20 million South Africans younger than 36 and one in three of them don’t work. The Gini coefficient is 0.77, making us the world’s most unequal society. The big questions are: What are you and I doing to change the status quo? What choices have you and I made to shift the needle? All of us call on government and the private sector to make the changes needed when we have so much of the agency in our own hands. The National Development Plan says that by 2030, 90% of new jobs will come from the small and medium-sized enterprises. Could you start a business and employ others? Could you take a pay cut so that you could employ another two people? This is why I left my corporate job to start a business. Not to invest in other businesses, but to become a black industrialist and to get my hands dirty manufacturing goods and building the economic capacity of South Africa. My partner, Siphamandla Ndawonde, and I are here to roll up our sleeves and work. I am not depressed by the state of the nation, but I am concerned and so I am acting to change our collective economic future. Will you join me? . Dlamini is the managing director of Maneli Group LET’S KEEP BUILDING THE ECONOMY TOGETHER Nhlanhla Dlamini PHOTO: VIC BRUMMER Carmen Busquets: For me, the winning strategy in any start-up business is: ‘Think big, but start small’
Transcript of UNDER CONSTRUCTION Nhlanhla Dlamini’s factory in ...manelifoods.com/media/city-press.pdf ·...
6 CITY PRESS, 9 OCTOBER, 2016
business
APROJECT IN
PARTNERSHIP WITH THE
IDC
TALKTO US
Are you a youngperson starting out inbusiness? Tell us your
story. Email us at [email protected] ‘Young business’
in the subjectline
Smart entrepreneurs look for opportunitieswhere others only see obstacles. That’s thebelief of Nhlanhla Dlamini, a youngindustrialist who has hit on the idea oftaking offcuts of ostrich, game andcrocodile meat and processing them into
high-end pet food and treats for the overseas market.“It’s basically taking waste products from abattoirs
and converting them into premium, value-added products, using proteins that aren’t available in other markets,” explains the brains behind Maneli Pets.
His new venture is securing Industrial Development Corporation (IDC) financing to buy machinery and convert a factory in Sebenza near Edenvale, east of Johannesburg, into an export-grade facility, which is due to begin production in March next year.
One man’s trash is another man’s treasure, so the saying goes, and Dlamini is excited about his new pet food venture using meat byproducts. The factory will create 40 new jobs (semi-skilled, unskilled and management) when it opens for business, with up to 300 positions being created in its first three years of operation.
Maneli Pets is an offshoot of the Maneli Group, a diversified food company that looks for opportunities to build businesses in the agricultural and green energy sector, while boosting black entrepreneurship. Maneli is his mother’s clan name, and he named his business in honour of “one of my biggest supporters”.
The backdrop to this is that South Africa has relatively few black-owned food production businesses, and government is actively promoting agroprocessing and the manufacturing sector in general to spur economic growth.
The country needs to make products to consume locally and also to export, instead of importing them. As such, the local food production and processing arena is ripe for the picking – with funding entities such as the IDC willing to step in to invest in worthwhile projects that create or expand manufacturing capability in the agriculture value chain.
“In Africa, the bulk of food is grown by multinationalsand there are opportunities for black entrepreneurs in this space,” says Dlamini animatedly. “With the country experiencing slow growth, we need a new generation of industrialists to step forward.”
Dlamini’s pioneering spirit was born in the Soweto
suburb of Mofolo South. His family moved to the south of Johannesburg, but his parents continued to run a small shop in Orlando East, meaning “I went back and forth between Soweto and suburbia”.
He got through much of high school and all of university thanks to scholarships, and is acutely aware that many of his peers, gifted and intelligent though they were, did not have the same opportunities.
“I was one of the lucky ones,” he reflects. “Had I not had access to scholarships and had my parents not made the sacrifices they did, my life would have
turned out differently.”He enrolled at Wits University for a BCom and a
postgraduate diploma in management, and started reaching for the stars: the US and a Harvard Business School MBA beckoned, and he worked at McKinsey & Company locally and abroad. In between, he completed his MPhil in international development at Oxford University in the UK.
His thesis was on youth unemployment in South Africa – knowing that he wanted to come home and make a difference.
“I’m firmly committed to South Africa – to try to grow the economy, create jobs and lower inequality,” says Dlamini.
“One of the bigger influences on my life was growingup seeing Nelson Mandela coming out of prison and becoming president, and others who sacrificed their lives for democracy. The sacrifices of this generation are far smaller than those of previous ones, so it’s up to us to stabilise the country and make it prosper.”
Dlamini believes the “formula” for a good entrepreneur is someone who can “spot an opportunity, build good teams and who has business acumen from formal education or work experience”. The last point is not something that can be brushed aside, he says, as selling your business to funders and your product to the market require a certain amount of business savvy.
Fortunately, there are small business “incubators”, such as the Awethu Project, that “build on the raw ingredients” or qualities that a budding entrepreneur has, and add extra skills and knowledge to help him or her get ahead, and this is where Dlamini obtained some of the seed capital for his first business.
Passionate though Dlamini is about South Africa, he “loved my time abroad” and is a firm advocate of travelling, broadening one’s horizons and learning from the world. In fact, it was while he was overseas that he spotted business models and innovations that he thought could be applied to South Africa.
“South African society is very insular, and we need tofind new ways of working better. Ideas come from a diversity of experiences and interactions – you can come up with good ideas about business and life if you push your boundaries beyond what you usually do,” says this former Rhodes Scholar and Goldman Sachs Global Leader.
“We also need a greater level of ambition. Americansare famous for being their own biggest supporters, and it’s a good skill to be your own biggest fan and be wildly ambitious – don’t let your mind constrain your ambition before you even start. South Africans are quite conservative and need to be more open to taking risks.”
Dlamini is not naive in his thinking – he knows that South Africa’s manufacturing sector has many challenges when it comes to labour, infrastructure and logistics.
“But there are pockets of opportunity and the challenges are not insurmountable,” says this natural optimist. “It’s how you navigate them that matters.”
UNDER CONSTRUCTION Nhlanhla Dlamini’s factory in Johannesburg will soon be humming with activity when it begins operations in March 2017 PHOTO: VIC BRUMMER
Opportunities out of obstacles
SA needs to produce more of its own consumer goodsas a primary way to ignite economic growth. Youngblack industrialist Nhlanhla Dlamini has accepted
the challenge, writes Christina Kennedy
FUNDINGThere are two parts to the funding conundrum. The first is debt, which is getting money from organisations like the IDC and from commercial banks. Unfortunately, South African banks are risk-averse, which is a stumbling block.
The second is equity. Most black entrepreneurs don’t have an uncle they can ask for money. It is difficult for entrepreneurs to get out of the starting blocks without an angel investor or family to fall back on.
DLAMINI’S 3 BIGGEST CHALLENGES TO SUCCESS
1 2 3BUILDING AGOOD TEAMWhen you are starting a small business, there’s more work to bedone than there are people, so everyone has to be 100% right for their role.
Finding great black talent to work in your small business is extremely difficult because dynamic black professionals are all snapped up by private or government jobs that pay them well above the price points that a small business can afford.
ENERGY ANDRESILIENCEAnyone starting a small business needs to be mindful of the peaks and valleys that entrepreneurship brings. From week to week, day to day, hour to hour, you can be on top of the world and then in the depths of despair.
You have to find ways of coping with this roller coaster – be it spiritually, actively or interpersonally – otherwise you will burn out quickly.
NHLANHLA [email protected]
As a young, passionate South African, I am deeply concerned about our stalled economic growth, our unemployment rates and our country’s desperate inequality.
All these malaises affect young people more deeply, those younger than 36 who should be empowered to move the needle and take our democracy forward.
I am 32 years old and I left my management consulting job because I knew that I couldn’t do enough in that role to eradicate inequality, create jobs and fuel the economy.
That said, it was risky and difficult for me to switchfrom a corporate job to entrepreneurship because, as a young person growing up in Soweto, I was socialised to revere an office job, which represents stability.
I took the risk because I felt that the time was right.I realised that if I didn’t take the plunge, I would never do it and forever wonder if I had missed my chance to leave a meaningful and lasting legacy on the economic landscape of South Africa.
Our democracy’s economic progress so far can be roughly divided into three periods. From 1994 until 2000, the priority was to stabilise our fledgling democracy with the goodwill of the world behind us.
The 2000s, until the crash of 2008, was a time of great economic prosperity and growth, with an economic growth high of 7.10% in the fourth quarter of 2006.
There was an emergence of black business leaders inall sectors and the black middle class swelled. These were my formative years, this is the South Africa I want to rekindle.
Since 2009, many upheavals at home and abroad have stalled our growth, and we all need to do our part to restart it. The growth rate for the last quarter to the end of June last year was 0.6%.
Quite rightly, the call goes out to government to do something. Government has put in place good policy – policy that is inclusive and that seeks to send the elevator back down for those who were left behind. However, government’s greatest challenge is implementing all these well-meaning policies and it needs to do much more to follow through on this.
The private sector, too, has been called on to do more. From a neoliberal perspective, our private sector is fulfilling its mandate of maximising shareholder gains.
It is a tall order, but a reasonable one given South Africa’s history of economic exclusion, that our corporate citizens should be doing more to help in the daily work of eradicating inequality, nurturing an environment that creates jobs and they should be
investing more in igniting growth. There are more than 20 million South Africans
younger than 36 and one in three of them don’t work. The Gini coefficient is 0.77, making us the world’s most unequal society.
The big questions are: What are you and I doing to change the status quo? What choices have you and I made to shift the needle? All of us call on government and the private sector to make the changes needed when we have so much of the agency in our own hands.
The National Development Plan says that by 2030, 90% of new jobs will come from the small and medium-sized enterprises. Could you start a business and employ others? Could you take a pay cut so that you could employ another two people?
This is why I left my corporate job to start a business. Not to invest in other businesses, but to become a black industrialist and to get my hands dirty manufacturing goods and building the economic capacity of South Africa.
My partner, Siphamandla Ndawonde, and I are hereto roll up our sleeves and work. I am not depressed by the state of the nation, but I am concerned and so I am acting to change our collective economic future.
Will you join me?. Dlamini is the managing director of Maneli Group
LET’S KEEP BUILDING THE ECONOMY TOGETHERNhlanhla DlaminiPHOTO: VIC
BRUMMER
Carmen Busquets: For me, the winning strategy in any start-up business is: ‘Think big, but start small’
